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What’s New in Google Analytics 4 (GA-4)?
GA-4, Google’s newest analytics platform, will replace Universal Analytics (UA) in July. The upgraded version incorporates all the insights you love from UA with a data model developed by Firebase for more accurate tracking and an in-depth understanding of your customers.
GA also provides AI-driven analytics based on customer life cycles, helping you tailor your campaigns according to your target audience. It’s an excellent addition to GA and ensures your business stays ahead of the competition.
Cross-Device Reporting
When it comes to your business, understanding how customers access and utilise your website across different devices is paramount. Cross-device tracking plays an integral role in providing an optimised customer experience and maximising the return on investment from marketing activities.
This is especially pertinent as an increasing number of people use multiple devices on a daily basis, such as phones, tablets and home computers. The way users move between these platforms creates an intricate customer journey that involves multiple touchpoints.
The difficulty with this type of analysis is that it requires measuring all micro-actions a user takes in order to reach their objective, such as signing up for an email newsletter, visiting a particular page on your site or purchasing something from your online store.
Google Analytics 4 (GA-4), introduces enhanced cross-device reporting that gives GA users more insight into their user tracking across mobile, tablet and desktop, providing a more holistic understanding of the customer journey.
Cross-device measurement in GA-4 relies on “Google Signals,” an anonymised version of Google’s user tracking. This behaviour modeling is also utilised by other Google products like AdWords and Display & Video 360 (formerly DoubleClick Bid Manager).
Jesse Savage, director of product management at Google Analytics, believes the Cross Device reports will give marketers a “better understanding” of how seemingly unrelated touch points, sessions and interactions are interconnected in order to optimise their campaigns more effectively.
Reports will appear in your GA account and provide details regarding device overlap, path mapping, deduplicated channel performance and acquisition device. This feature will be made available to all accounts over the course of several weeks.
Utilising new technology will enable brands to provide a more tailored and pertinent customer experience. Furthermore, it will enable them to maximise their investments in the most effective channels, leading to improved ROIs as well as the identification of potential business opportunities.
Audience Lists
Audience lists are an essential feature of Google Analytics 4 (GA-4). They help you identify and target people who are interested in your product or service, which can be beneficial for customer retention and churn management, as well as ensuring your content remains pertinent to users.
GA4 allows you to create audiences based on several criteria, such as demographics, behavior, technology and acquisition. These lists can be used for targeting specific users for various marketing activities like remarketing, cross-selling or the launch of a new product.
Constructing a custom audience is one of the first steps in GA4. You have complete control over who joins your audience, and templates make it easy to get started quickly.
The next step is to define conditions for your audience, which means telling GA4 when you want the list made available to users. These conditions can be applied across all sessions, in a single session, or within an event.
You can define the conditions for an audience by clicking on the drop-down next to the user icon and selecting a time frame you’d like it applied to. Doing this allows Google to accurately assess your target group’s scope of interest and make it available accordingly.
Audience lists can also include users on a remarketing list, which is composed of users who have visited your website and previously identified themselves as being interested in your products. Utilising this type of audience will increase conversions and maximize the efficiency of your marketing budget.
Similar audiences are a way of retargeting your existing users with ads tailored to their interests. These are created by compiling a seed list of users who have previously visited your website and then identifying those who share similar characteristics as those in the seed list.
Expanding your reach and reaching more potential customers can be a great idea, but be aware that similar audiences are not as accurate as standard audience lists. They are constructed based on assumptions about the characteristics of users in your seed list and often contain inaccurate data, so it’s best to take them with a grain of salt.
Custom Dimensions
Custom dimensions are an invaluable feature of Google Analytics 4 (GA-4). They enable you to add more detailed data to the events collected, providing valuable insights into how visitors engage with your website.
Custom dimensions were an advanced feature of GA prior to GA-4, Universal Analytics (UA), that marketers rarely utilised. But in GA-4 they’ve become a fundamental building block for campaign management and data analysis. You’ll see them in many reports; they provide an excellent opportunity to extend your default reporting setup and collect data that meets specific needs.
Depending on the event type you’re tracking, custom dimensions can be set up to monitor a single hit or an array of hits over time. Furthermore, you have the option of selecting either a specific user or product scope for monitoring purposes.
For instance, if you run a membership site or eCommerce store, it would be beneficial to know which users are logging in with their usernames. Doing this will give you insight into how effective your login form is and which pages of your site are being visited by logged-in visitors.
Create a Custom Dimension in Google Analytics by going to the Admin page and clicking on Custom Definitions. In that same section, click on “+New Custom Dimension” and create your new dimension by clicking it.
When creating a custom dimension for your website or business, be sure to give it an appropriate name that reflects the nature of your site or industry. You may also select an extent for the dimension – such as hits or sessions – so be sure to choose one that makes sense for both of you.
When reporting with custom dimensions, it’s wise to archive them after being used up so as not to accidentally overwrite your data. Archiving a custom dimension is permanent; once archived, there can never be any retrieval of the collected information.
Custom dimensions can be created and utilized in many ways, but the most popular use is reporting. For instance, creating a custom dimension that tracks author data makes it simpler to generate reports that compare pageviews by author. You may also use custom dimensions to identify different groups of users such as an age group or region.
Machine Learning
Google Analytics 4 (GA-4) brings the newest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to this popular analytics platform. The new system fills data gaps and offers insightful insights about user behavior, trends, and anomalies.
It also offers superior automated insights, saving you time from having to spend hours poring over data and making informed decisions about your business. In fact, it can alert you automatically when performance changes, helping focus on what matters most and taking your digital marketing strategy to new heights.
Let’s first examine how GA4 utilises machine learning to fill in data gaps and offer insights that previous versions of Google Analytics simply couldn’t deliver. With increasing privacy concerns, many internet users are opting out of cookies and identifiers, leaving marketers without a complete overview of their visitors’ behaviours.
Machine learning is the only way to fill these gaps, enabling Analytics to group users into cohorts based on similar traits and behaviours. This way, Analytics can monitor how each cohort navigates your website and mobile apps, giving you a comprehensive view of your audience’s behaviour.
Another key feature in GA4 is Audiences, which enable you to create subsets of users for remarketing and analysis purposes. As more data is collected in GA4, these audiences are constantly evaluated to ensure they remain pertinent to your business needs.
Audiences are an invaluable tool for discovering why some groups of customers aren’t engaging with your business or why certain users spend/purchase less than others. Furthermore, they allow for re-targeting new users who haven’t engaged yet by sending them ads that will reengage them.
GA4 not only boasts these powerful features, but it also includes other useful tools that will aid your business growth and enhance digital marketing strategy. For instance, its improved customer journey report gives marketers a deeper insight into how their customers engage with websites and apps.